The Tender Boughs of Innocence
by Amatara
Summary: Albert's faith in the scientific method is tested by one of Gordon Cole's Blue Rose cases. Pre-canon case fic.


Author's notes:

Story title was taken from a line (spoken by the Log Lady) in _Fire Walk With Me_: "The tender boughs of innocence burn first, and the wind rises, and then all goodness is in jeopardy."

One note on canonicity with repect to Dennis/Denise Bryson: given that Cooper was expecting _Dennis_ to show up in Twin Peaks, I realize it's unlikely that Albert already knew her as Denise several years before that. But I couldn't resist the call to write some pre-series Albert & Denise interaction, so please take my handwaving in the spirit in which it was intended, and let's all just assume there's a perfectly good explanation, shall we? :)

Although one of the characters from the story (Chet Desmond) was not in the series but only in _Fire Walk with Me_, this fic can be read without having seen the movie.

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**The Tender Boughs of Innocence**

* * *

Albert froze when he caught the sound of footsteps at the door. Automatically, he braced himself. He'd spent his first three months in the Philadelphia office in constant fear of a heart attack before learning to pick up on the signs of Gordon Cole's approach. Never mind the man was deaf as a post, he could sneak up on you like a case of the flu.

"ALBERT, I'LL SAY IT FAIR AND SQUARE." Gordon popped up at the end of the autopsy table like a particularly slick-suited Genie. "YOU DIDN'T LAND YOURSELF AN EASY CASE. THIS IS THE STUFF NIGHTMARES ARE MADE OF." Somehow, the verbal fusillade managed to convey genuine concern.

Albert tightened his grip on the scalpel and shrugged with all the nonchalance he could muster. "It's a corpse. They're not in the habit of looking like Snow White."

The dispassionate tone wouldn't fool Gordon, but Albert hoped that with enough effort, he might just manage to fool himself. He didn't reckon himself a coward, a crybaby or a cream puff. What he _was_ was a tender twenty-nine, which at the Bureau still counted as very green behind the ears, but he had skill and wit and a bloodhound's instinct for clues, and he didn't rattle easily. Which was what had earned him this case to begin with.

Right now, calling him 'rattled' would be stating it mildly.

Gordon's Blue Rose cases – the freak cases, the ones that defied explanation – were infamous at the Philly office. Almost everyone working for Gordon got assigned one at some point. Not just the agents, apparently, but the pathologists too. Usually, the junior Bureau members would be assisted by someone more experienced, but Albert hadn't worked himself to the bone to get this posting just to have some arrogant Special Agent twit breathing down his neck. He'd pull this off alone or not at all.

So far, his report was carefully neutral. Janet Delaney, aged thirty-two, was reported missing two days ago and found pushing up daisies this morning in a back alley in downtown Gettysburg. Cause of death: blood loss. No major injuries, but plenty of shallow ones which, accumulated, resulted in her death. Nothing particularly riveting, if not for the nature of the injuries. They were tiny, barely the size of a fingernail, but there were hundreds of them scattered all over the body, red and jagged and ugly, radiating outwards in a perfect spiral pattern centered on the victim's heart.

With an effort, Albert looked away from the tattered remains on the slab. His first guess, the obvious guess, had been a ritual killing. Except that didn't fit, because none of the abrasions were human-inflicted. The wounds on the torso - those swirling, hypnotizing, obscenely intricate patterned cuts - were claw marks. Not human. Animal.

"I NEVER LIKED BIRDS," Gordon bellowed into his ear. "DID YOU KNOW THEY'RE DISTANT RELATIVES OF DINOSAURS?"

Albert _mph'_ed assent between clenched teeth. Gordon had a sharper eye than you'd give him credit for. Birds, no doubt; and given the claw pattern and the feathers found on the crime site, Albert was thinking Eastern screech-owl. Except that made no goddamn sense, as this woman wasn't found in a deserted neck of the woods but in the middle of a concrete jungle. And last time he checked, owls didn't engage in group body-art projects.

He shuddered in spite of himself. Corpses were all well and good, but birds gave him the jitters; always had, for as long as he could remember. He had no rational explanation. Well, maybe he had, but it was one he preferred not to think about. His mother used to get hysterical at the sight of birds – she'd called them monsters, devil's spawn. Of course his mother had never been the standard by which Albert measured sanity. She'd believed in things no sane person would, claiming dreams and premonitions that drove her and everyone around her to despair. Albert had always clung to science and rationality because he'd seen the alternative first-hand. But although he wasn't one to fall for superstition, not even as a sullen, scrawny kid growing up in suburbia, some of it must have rubbed off on him anyway. A fierce dislike of birds; an irrational fear of open spaces; some weird, random hunches that he'd always done his best to ignore. His mother was long gone, but he still didn't know what to do with those errant bits of irrationality.

And now he was being a sentimental sap, which wasn't what the Bureau had hired him for. His job was to crack this case, and for that he needed to look past the cheap circus tricks the killer had used to cover his tracks, and dig down to the motive and the means. It was as simple as that. Personal sentiments be damned.

Except nothing was ever simple if you had the gall to think it was. A week later, Albert was clean out of options, and it was driving him up the wall. It didn't help that Gordon hadn't relieved him in any way of his regular duties at the lab. Apparently, Albert was expected to take on this case after hours, and if that meant no hours left for sleeping, tough luck. That was Gordon too. Still, Albert had run every test he could think of that made sense, and plenty of others that didn't, but he was clutching at straws. Even his last-ditch resort, looking up all people in a two-mile radius of the crime scene who held owls or other large birds as pets, turned up a whole lot of freaks but no other clues at all.

His break, when it finally did come, was in a shape he'd have given up his paycheck _not_ to get.

It was Chet Desmond who brought in the second victim, a week to the day after they'd rolled in the first. Cool, unrattled Chet, two years younger than Albert but acting for all the world like he was born in the Bureau, came breezing into the lab just as Albert was opening up the body. A young male, found in a ditch over ten miles away from where the woman was killed. It seemed Chet had turned him up while digging into a series of missing-person cases. This corpse was in worse shape than the first, but the connection was unmistakable: those same tight, intricate shapes, chiseled in bloody streaks across the torso. Albert was reminded, suddenly and vividly, of the spirograph he'd owned as a kid. This was, he thought, with a rush of nausea that had nothing to do with the state of the body and everything with imagination, as if a toddler had been turned loose with a spirograph and a bread knife.

"Those claw marks." Chet's voice was cool, verging on amused. Albert got the unpleasant feeling he'd just been read like a book. "Owls as well?"

"We'll have to wait for the analysis. But I'll eat my shoes if it says anything else." Albert watched Chet's mouth pucker into a sardonic half-smile, one that came dangerously close to being attractive. He winced and snapped himself back to the business at hand.

"Any traces of foreign material on the victim?" Chet said. "Skin fragments, semen, blood?"

Albert stripped off his gloves. Fuck, he needed a shower. But the man was asking the right questions, and Albert daily interacted with too many idiots to pass up the chance for intelligent conversation. "Nothing," he said. "This killer leaves no trace."

"No trace?" Chet repeated. "Are you sure about that?"

"That's what the test results showed," Albert snapped. He flung the gloves into the trash with sudden vehemence. "If you're questioning those, I suggest you take it up with – "

"I'm not talking about results, but interpretation," Chet said. "You're looking for human perpetrators. But in both cases, the injuries were not inflicted by a person, but an animal. A nocturnal owl, specifically. That doesn't strike you as peculiar?"

Albert gritted his teeth. "Agent Desmond, if there's some point you're trying to make here –"

"They say owls are the bearers of souls. Did you know that?" Chet leaned across the autopsy table. For a second, despite the glare of the midday sun through the window, his eyes were chips of black, unyielding and grim. "This is a Blue Rose case, Dr. Rosenfield. You do know what that is?"

"What do you take me for, an idiot? It's a case that can't be solved by conventional methods."

"That's one answer." Chet pursed his lips, looking almost disappointed. "Another answer would be : a case that involves phenomena which can't be natural. That's how Gordon picks them, and I've never known Gordon's hunches to be wrong." He pulled back abruptly, leaving Albert to blink in the suddenly too-bright light. "There are powers in this world that transcend our understanding, Dr. Rosenfield. Some of those powers are benevolent, others are lethal beyond measure. Don't disregard them. Definitely don't underestimate them. For your own sake, _and_ that of the victims."

With that, he turned and was gone, leaving Albert to chew on the bizarreness of the exchange.

He was still chewing a few days later, when they brought in the little girl.

Albert prided himself on his ability to compartmentalize. He'd seen plenty of grisly scenes in his life and never once come close to cracking. But that was before he got a case of his own. Looking down at the broken body, the skin peppered with claw marks like so many dabs of red fingerpaint, it was all he could do not to turn and bolt.

What was it Chet Desmond had said? For the victims' sakes? Here was another victim, the direct consequence of Albert's failure to track down those responsible and bring them to justice. The third in a row, and he still felt no closer to an answer.

He dreamed that night, in vivid, frantic colors. He was running, running, through an unknown part of the city, the rush of massive wingbeats closing in. His steps cracked on the pavement like gunshots, but the faster he ran, the stronger it was: a presence, swooping in behind him, primal and vicious and not at all human. He could hear it cackling, feel its hot breath in his neck.

It caught up with him just as he woke, hands clawing uselessly at the sheets.

Not an owl, but a thing in the shape of an owl, and a mind sharp as a diamond, hissing, whistling, cajoling, pleading. _Come. Fear me. Let me in._

Owls, he thought, sagging back against the pillow. Always owls. But why? His mother – her mental health had always been shaky, but some of her visions had been uncannily close to the mark. Even Albert had to admit that. And her terror of birds had been beyond rational. _Owls are the bearers of souls, _Chet had said. Albert had filed it away as just another cryptic comment, but for the first time, he wondered if it hadn't meant much more than that. If he had been looking at this all wrong.

There was only one person he trusted enough to ask, and she beat him to it.

He wasn't sure how to describe his relationship with Denise Bryson. She'd been in the Philadelphia office for some time as part of an exchange with the DEA, and she and Albert had grown… not exactly close, but friendly. No doubt part of it was her brazenness. Albert would never risk being as open about his preferences as Denise was about her own, but he did admire her for putting her cards on the table. Admiration, in Albert, was not a common sentiment. And there was an ease between them that was hard to explain. He'd found Denise the perfect sounding-board: she had strong opinions, but she played fair and judged on merits and character, not methods. Denise, in turn, had adopted a kind of maternal attitude that Albert would tolerate from no one else.

That afternoon, he passed her on his way to the lab. His frustration must have shown on his face, because she gave him one good look, hooked an arm through his, and dragged him to the cafeteria without a word.

"So," she said, balancing her coffee mug between thumb and index finger. "I hear Gordon handed you a tough one."

Albert scowled down into his espresso cup. "They're all tough, Denise, let not kid ourselves. The thing about this one is –" He paused, digging for a reply that wouldn't sound completely inane. "Any case has a rational explanation. If you don't find it, I figure it just means you're not looking well enough. But this case… Hell, the only explanation that seems right, that _feels_ right, also happens to be totally ludicrous on a rational level. And that requires…"

"A leap of faith?" Denise supplied.

"I was going to say 'a complete and utter abandonment of common sense', but the gist is the same."

Denise smiled. "So you've got instinct clashing with reason. That happens to the best of us, Albert. What's so bad about trusting those instincts for once?"

Albert forced himself to consider the question. Instinct, hunches, faith, visions, dreams – they all gave him the heebie-jeebies and always had. The same was true about religion. It was hard enough to sustain the illusion of having control over one's life without the idea of some divine being divvying up the seats in heaven and hell afterwards. The moment you took a leap of faith, chances were it'd land you face-down in the muck. Or the ravine. He'd always believed that, and he was sure he always would.

Denise uncrossed her legs and leaned towards him. "Albert, these Blue Rose cases – Gordon gave me one, once, and I never asked for another, so don't think I don't sympathize. My point is, this attitude isn't gonna help you crack the case. The only way you can even begin to fight this thing is by keeping your eyes open, and seeing what's there. _Actually there. _To see the truth for what it is."

"The truth," Albert said grimly. "What does that even mean, Denise? And how the hell will I know when I see it?"

"It'll come to you," she said, and patted his knee.

Albert spent the next night poring over his autopsy reports. Talking with Denise had given him, if not the gusto, then at least the kick in the backside he'd needed to dig back into the case. But like all previous times he came up dry. Then, crossing a mental line he'd never envisioned himself crossing, he pulled up some research on animal symbolism. He felt like a moron for even trying, but who knew if there wasn't some truth in what Chet Desmond had said. He was out of sensible options anyway.

It was slow going at first, mostly because every word he read struck him as something straight out of La-La Land. But out of sheer pigheadedness he pushed on. Owls were said to guard the underworld. They were believed to be the keepers of spirits passing from one plane to another. The Aztec god of death was frequently depicted with owls; in many cultures they were considered bad omens, harbingers of death. Others revered them as witch's familiars – soul-spirits linked to a person via a unique, communicative bond. Long past midnight, eyes gritty with fatigue but absorbed despite himself, he was still stubbornly chipping away.

The sound had been going on for some time before it registered. A scraping noise, faint but insistent, like an itch under his skin. Albert stiffened and turned, squinting into the gloom of the autopsy suite where he'd set up a temporary office. He had to be more knackered than he thought, because he'd swear the light had a fractured quality about it, like seeing through distorted glasses. It was a pitch-black, overcast night, and the measly bulb that was his reading light seemed to waver. Albert swallowed and turned another page. Fuck Denise and her terrific advice. Now he was seeing ghosts too.

He'd barely made it through another paragraph when the feeling became unshakable. Something was lurking at the edge of his vision, waiting to make its move. For another few seconds, he managed to ignore it. Then the overhead light flickered briefly, frantically, and went out.

He didn't know what possessed him to put down the stylus, or to get up and start walking down the corridor that led to the courtyard outside. All he knew was he couldn't resist the impulse if he tried.

The moment he closed the back door behind him, he already knew what he'd find.

There were scores of them, grey and silent and ominous, ringing the fence all around him. Their heads bobbed, left and right, right and left, like automatons. _They're just owls_, he thought, desperately. Whatever else they were, fierce and savage and potentially lethal, they were animals. There couldn't be anything evil about them. Or at least that's what he might have believed, if one of them hadn't been watching him with malice burning in its eyes. And hissed, in the voice from his dreams:

_"You were looking for me. Now you've found me. Let me in… or die."_

Albert opened his mouth, but no words came. He backed away towards the door, blindly fumbled at the latch. It refused to budge.

"I know what you are," Albert rasped, turning back to face the creature. Suddenly, he couldn't see how he hadn't understood it before. "I know what you want. You want bodies to possess, and you slaughtered those people because they didn't want to play nice and share. Well, I'm not up for sharing either. So go to hell. Isn't that where you came from anyway?"

They charged in a slow-motion rush of wings, sweeping him off his feet. Albert teetered and went down, hitting the stones hard enough to knock the wind out of him. Something jabbed at his cheek, and he struck out, batting at a screeching mass of feathers and claws and pecking beaks. Another claw grazed his stomach, a third one slashed at his wrist. Panic rose, threatening to choke him, but somehow he managed to dig up a last scrap of resistance. He didn't know how, but he latched onto something – the shadow of a presence, clawing, raging, screaming – and clung to it as darkness rushed up to meet him.

When he opened his eyes, he was in a room. At least it looked like a room, even if it felt like something else entirely, a portal to heaven or hell or whatever pathetic metaphor his backbrain seemed to believe was appropriate. There were deep, trembling shadows, and swaying curtains, and Albert was sprawled in a graceless heap on a tiled marble floor.

It took him embarrassingly long to scramble to his feet, and even longer to get his breathing under control. By that time, he'd considered and discarded the whole spectrum of sensible explanations – that he was hallucinating, unconscious or mad. The rational part of his brain was still flailing, but he stomped it down with a ruthlessness he tended to reserve for tyrants and troglodytes. Because that other part of him, the one he kept tucked away in the farthest corner of his mind, knew better. It was telling him now, with a certainty that made his bones ache: this place was real. If it was, so was the danger. If _he _was here, chances were those murderous owls were too, so there was no excuse to keep standing around like an idiot, waiting for the cavalry to march in. He had to move.

The room he was in had no visible exits, so he turned into the empty corridor at his right. The floor looked slick and slippery, but it stuck to his soles like mud, and the white-and-crimson tiles were making his head spin. He kept looking back across his shoulder. The owls hadn't followed him, but he wasn't alone here. Footsteps and sobs and eerie snatches of laughter all mingled into a pulsing background thrum. His blood was rushing in his ears, but he gritted his teeth and turned another corner. Again, no one was there. Just to make sure, he turned on his heels…

The empty corridor was no longer empty. Instead it held a mirror, stretching from floor to ceiling, a bloodied pattern of broken glass in the center. As if someone had rammed it head-first. Something about it turned Albert's stomach, but he couldn't look away.

He took one step closer. When nothing happened, he took another, glancing back every few heartbeats to make sure he wasn't being stalked from behind. Still no movement, in the mirror or behind him.

Another step. He was close enough now that his breath was fogging the glass. He reached out a hand –

The glass shattered like a firebomb.

Albert dove for the floor as shards filled the air. His breath was screaming in his throat, but somehow he made it back to his knees and then to his feet. For one second, he'd seen it. A face in the mirror. Filthy white hair, and a grin that filled him with a terror so pervasive it was all he could do get his muscles to cooperate. He turned to run, but suddenly the floor turned slick, like ice, and his feet went out from under him. The ceiling slid past in a shimmering crimson blur. Then his head hit the tiles, and he blacked out.

When he came to, he was on his back, blinking up into a man's face. Not a young man, because his hair was white and thinning at his forehead. Not an unfamiliar face either, though Albert couldn't for the life of him place where he'd seen it before.

"Albert," the old man said. "You saw through them. You followed them here." His voice was filled with surprise, or something more than surprise: warmth, and a shattered kind of joy.

"Wha–" Albert began, but he was silenced by a cautioning hand.

"I will try to explain, Albert, but we don't have much time. The owls – they're spirits, like you thought, using animal bodies to hunt for human souls. They hunt in packs. Ordinary owls are drawn to them. You were looking for them, so it appears they decided to silence you." The crinkled lips turned up into the hint of a smile. "But they made a mistake by allowing you in here."

Albert stared, trying to latch onto the deluge of words but failing utterly to make sense of it. His head hurt like hell, and his vision kept blurring. "What is this place?"

"Some call it the Waiting Room. Few people enter it, and even fewer manage to leave. Whatever the case, you can only enter it once. If you escape, they can never force you to come back, unless you do so willingly. I can help you, Albert; I can buy you the time you need to escape. But you'll have to hurry. They're coming."

Albert pushed himself up on his elbows. "Who are you? How do you even know all this?" And now he was sounding like a game of Ten Questions, but screw that.

"I can't tell you that," the man said softly. "All I can say is that you'll one day save my soul – possibly my life. Remember what you saw here. Lives depend on it, Albert. The Room never shows you anything without a reason." He narrowed his eyes at something Albert couldn't see. "They're coming. They won't follow you outside, but you have to leave. Please, leave, Albert. _Now_."

The light flickered; the shadows squeezed tight around him. In the distance something wailed, high-pitched and frantic and ravenous, swelling like a wave. Albert lurched to his feet, wheeled and leapt blindly.

There was a tearing sensation, like a jolt of electricity frying his synapses. His muscles spasmed, and for a heart-stopping moment he couldn't breathe, or scream, or blink. He was vaguely aware of struggling against a current towards a rapidly shrinking doorway, hands clawing at his arms, his ankles, his throat. Then he gave a last, desperate squeeze, and was through.

The first sign that he was back in the real world was the feel of smooth material under his hands. The second was the light filtering through his eyelids, which was steady and strong. Opening his eyes confirmed it. So he wasn't bleeding dry on the doorstep, being pecked apart by a flock of rabid birds. He was inside, slumped over his desk, his cheek mashed against a tome on Hopi mythology. But he didn't have the energy to turn his head or do anything except force wheezing gulps of air down his throat. That, and register the hand on his shoulder.

"Dr. Rosenfield?" someone, probably the owner of the hand, said. The voice – male, young, serious – was familiar in a fuzzy kind of way, but Albert was still too preoccupied breathing to turn around and check who it belonged to.

"I'm fine," Albert said, only it came out more like a rasp. "Nightmare," he tried again, finally getting control over his vocal cords. "Must have conked out reading. I'm fine." He must have sounded like a madman or a stroke victim, but for once he didn't care.

The hand lifted from his shoulder. Instead of pulling back entirely, it hovered over Albert's paperwork, across the piles of books on symbolism and witchcraft and religions and cults. The man's breathing was very tight, very controlled. And very, _very _familiar. "You don't strike me as a man prone to nightmares," the voice observed. It might have been an idle statement, if not for the tone of genuine alarm. A tone Albert wouldn't even have recognized if he hadn't heard it at least once before.

He turned around. Lifted his head, muscles screaming with effort, and had to squeeze back the image of the red room, the murderous owls, the fading screams in the distance. "No," he said, slowly. "No, I'm not. Mister…"

"Cooper," the man said, extending his arm. "Special Agent Dale Cooper. We haven't met, but I know you by reputation. I hope we'll get the chance to work together."

"Same here," Albert breathed, and shook Cooper's hand.


End file.
